


Under Glass

by calrissian18



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Derek Hale, Canon-Smash, Cursed Stiles Stilinski, M/M, Mild References to Self-Harm, Pining, Pop Culture References Out the Yang, Spark Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-13 06:49:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3371846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calrissian18/pseuds/calrissian18
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The pack goes looking for a cursed artifact.  Stiles would really like to go back to the time before he found it, thanks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under Glass

**Author's Note:**

> The first of three fics that will post this week. You're going to be _so_ sick of me.
> 
> Written for the fullmoon_ficlet prompt: Mirror.

“Put it down.”  Derek barely looks up to give the reprimand.  Does that thing where his head twitches like it’s going to turn, nostrils flaring, like he’s got Wolfy-senses specifically tuned to, ‘Stiles is having an independent thought – danger, Will Robinson.’

Stiles grumbles under his breath, feeling every inch the chastised child Derek treats him as.  He drops the statuette back down on the shelf, a mite heavy-handedly and wholly sullen about it.  Derek  _could_  make it less obvious how dim-witted he thought Stiles was, even if it was only in the interest of giving off a, ‘Kumbaya, let’s rock these rainsticks and group hug,’ vibe.

Scott was never going to stop wanting Stiles around and Derek was never not going to be their best—well, most  _cooperative_ —source of lycanthropic information so they were stuck with each other.  Any time Derek wanted to stop being a dick about that was a-okay with Stiles.

The shelf groans, wobbling precariously as the weight hits it, and Stiles scurries away from it, quickly pretending he was never in its vicinity.  It’s  _maybe_ a little over the top to start whistling. 

Derek glares at him, eyes ringing red, and Stiles hates the way that can still make his skin break out in goosebumps.

He purposefully ignores the angry wolfman huffing at him, jutting his chin in the complete opposite direction and choosing to stick to the Hale that’s a little less obvious about despising him.

“Get off my jock, Stilinski,” Cora snarks as soon as she notices her shadow.  Which is almost instantaneously.  Girl’s surprisingly twitchy after being kidnapped by Alpha werewolves and locked in a bank vault.

Stiles snorts.  “Classy,” he tells her, knocking her with his shoulder. 

She snarls, ears going slightly pointed. 

Stiles’ eyes are half-lidded over an unimpressed stare.  She won’t hurt him.  Derek… he’s more of a wildcard because he has hurt Stiles before and, let’s be real, most likely will again.  But Cora’s all yippy, unintimidating bark compared to her brother.  And, besides, Stiles likes  _her_.

“Aren’t you supposed to be paying attention to this yard sale junk?  Get all tingly over it with your ‘Spark’ or whatever?”  She thrusts her chin out towards a cracked telescope, sounding seriously dubious about his extrasensory abilities.  Stiles would take offense to that but he’s definitely the biggest dissenter when it comes to the, ‘Stiles is supernaturally significant,’ tangent Deaton often goes off on.

He does take a cursory look around to placate her though.  It’s a lot like they’ve found the basement to  _The Cabin in the Wood_ s.  Only instead of malevolent, pick-your-fatal-adventure death baubles, they’ve found ones a weird, hoarder carnie might have.

He shrugs.  “Cujo over there didn’t seem to want me involved because he doesn’t trust me not to choke on my own spit.”  He sounds bitter as fuck but he’s also been treated like a clumsy guy made of tissue paper who juggled broken glass professionally practically since he and Derek met.  And that got old after about five minutes.

“Just get to it,” she says with a roll of her eyes, grabbing him by the hood of his sweatshirt and steering him in front of a line of shelves.

At least someone thinks he can do this, even if it is in a little less of a, ‘rah rah,’ and more of a, ‘stabby bite-y,’ way than he would like. 

His hand’s hovering near something that looks like a broken ship in a bottle when Derek growls out what an idiot he is and tells him to go sit in the corner with his hands under his thighs like a proper kindergartener.

Stiles puffs up his cheeks, looking remarkably similar to an offended blowfish, and narrows his eyes in an effort to keep from spewing out all the incredibly hateful things he would like to in response.  Unfortunately having Cora less than a foot away from him means he has to be the bigger man or risk her punching him in the face.  Even though he would so much rather be the petty, accurately cruel one.  He storms out, red-faced and shaking, rather than lose the fight with keeping his jaw clenched and his mouth  _closed_.

Lydia finds him on the porch counting to ten.  “It shouldn’t be that hard for you to look and not touch.”

Stiles throws her a violent glare and stares down at the distressed knees of his jeans.  It’s not that he thinks he can do this, because he doesn’t.  This Spark stuff sounds a lot like what you would tell a human kid in a pack of werewolves.  That kind of, ‘you have your own special skills, buttercup,’ bullshit.  It somehow still stings that everyone else around him is so blatant about not believing it too.  “I get it, Derek thinks I’m a liability.  I’m staying out of the way, aren’t I?”

“You can’t be that obtuse,” Lydia says, eyes squinted and gaze searching his face intently.  Only a month ago, that would have made his heart do an odd squirm-leap thing in his chest, to have her so focused on him.  Now he  _really_  wants her to look  _anywhere_  else.

“What?  He’s  _always_  on me about something,” Stiles says exasperatedly.  It really does seem like every time he turns around, there Derek is – breathing down his neck and snapping about the right way to tie shoes if he doesn’t want to end up braining himself on a staircase.  He’s never had anyone hate him  _so relentlessly_.  Even Jackson was only a dick to him when Stiles was in his direct line of sight.

“Exactly,” Lydia says primly, like Stiles has made her argument for her.

“Oh yeah, like  _that_  means anything.  You’ve only just realized you had no point and now you’re trying to get away with it using some kind of ambiguous certainty.”

Lydia’s mouth purses.  And it’s clear this has gone from a calm conversation to one that’s looking to verbally kick him in the dick.  “Derek never leaves you alone, have you ever thought that might be because he  _can’t_?”

“He  _can_ ,” Stiles argues back even though he’s not totally sure  _what_  he’s arguing.  “He just finds it more spiritually rewarding to be a douchebag with rage issues at all times.  I’m beginning to think he’s like that  _Jeepers Creepers_  dude, gets off on the stink of Stilinski-fear.”

Lydia rolls her eyes—and she’s the second person to do that to him in under an hour, does  _not_  bode well—and stands to leave.  “If you’re going to be purposefully dense about this, I’m not going to bother.”

Stiles has no idea what she’s talking about, which he guesses is kind of her point.  He doesn’t try to call her back though.  He’d come out here to be alone, not to find another person who would treat him like he was useless.  He’s gotten a lifetime’s worth of feeling insecure, unintelligent and disposable thanks to Derek Hale.

* * *

“I’m getting total Slayer Potential vibes from this area right here.  Like, if I had a scrying crystal ma-bobber it would hit that spot with the force of a friggin’ Hulk-punch and dent the shit out of this table.  Side note: we should use scrying crystals because I super want to see that, for future reference.  Main point: I am having a definitive Spark-like  _feeling_.”   A chill even dances up Stiles’ back as he points down at the map and there’s a kind of unsettled anticipation in his gut.

Derek looks like he wants to tell the pack to search everywhere  _but_  there because he’s just that big of an asshole but he clenches and flexes his jaw instead.

Stiles ignores his internal struggle against his inherent douchebaggery in favor of the askance look Isaac is giving him.  “Have you seriously not watched  _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_?”  He’s not even exaggerating how appalled he is.  “That’s not even an obscure reference, dude.”  He taps the location on the map and says in clearer terms, “There’s something here, I’m sure of it.  Something as powerful as, like, Mjölnir.”  Well, he was  _trying_  to use clearer terms anyway.

“It’s only a few miles out.  We’ll go tonight,” Derek says with some actual authority and Stiles doesn’t analyze the way Derek listening to him makes him feel warm all over.

* * *

There’s nothing but an empty warehouse, which is monumentally disappointing because it had  _felt_  so right up to that point.  And Stiles had been pretty sure it was all bunk until that little fire in his gut had flared up and said, ‘this is it.’  Apparently, ‘it,’ equaled, ‘indigestion,’ and he needed to be a tad more discerning when it came to his gut feelings. 

Still, he can’t face the, ‘I told you so,’ looks or, worse, the pitying ones Scott will give him in an attempt at solidarity and wanders the length of the building while the rest of the pack fans out.  Now just pretending reconnaissance rather than actually performing it.  

He sighs to himself, disappointed to find he’s actually surprised by the scale of his failure when the feeling comes back.  Like something’s calling out to him,  _pulling_  him to where he’s meant to be.  He rounds a corner and the  _whatever it is_  glints.  It’s smaller than he would’ve thought, resting innocuously on a crate in the corner, almost like it’s been left out specifically for him.  Drawing closer, he can see that it’s tarnished metal in the shape of a… hairbrush maybe?  There are no bristles underneath it though.

Only once he’s nearly on top of it can he see that there’s a sort of pattern to the metal.  And it’s not an attractive one.  It looks mostly like rivulets of magma that have hardened into the unfortunate shape he’s seeing.  His fingers are reaching out for it before he’s even consciously made the decision to grab it.  It  _feels_  like what he’s supposed to do though.  This is why he’s here and he knows it with a certainty that steals his breath.

His fingertips brush the handle and the cold of the frame nearly makes him flinch back a step.  He fights the instinct and surges forward, cradles it in his hand, which is sweating despite the icy metal.  He holds the warped design up to his face and there’s a sort of rioting in his stomach as he looks at it, like he’s experiencing a gravid paradigm shift, only nothing’s changed.

Absolutely  _nothing_.

He drops his hand and the thing hangs somewhat heavier than it seems it should, dragging down his fingers as he loosely grips the handle.  He’ll have to meet up with the pack again, show them exactly what he’s led them to and how worthless it all is.  How worthless  _he_  is.  Derek’s undoubtedly going to have some choice words about that. 

Stiles grimaces, tightens up his grip and his fingers on the underside brush smooth surface rather than uneven cold.  It feels like—like  _glass_.  Like a  _mirror_.  Something in him  _pings_  as soon as the word centers in his mind and the thing grows heavier, drags his arm down like he’s holding on to a ship’s anchor and it’s either be dragged down or drop it.

He drops it.

It hits the wood floor with a heavy  _thud_ , tilts and lands so that the face of it is up.  Lands so that he’s blinking into his own.  His eyes are wide and, he’s unhappy to note, brimming with terror. There’s something off about it, something about the foggy edges of it eat into his features.

He’s never felt so unsettled by his own reflection because there’s something—something not  _him_  about it and he takes a careful swallow and steps back so he can’t see into it any longer.

He runs into an empty row of shelves, does a double-take as he catches it in his periphery.  Only a moment ago it had looked unused but abandoned.  Now there are cobwebs hanging off of it, the metal’s rusted, the dust is so layered Stiles is breathing more in wheezes.

He spins around and the crate he found the mirror on is in splinters, the walls are polka-dotted in ugly patches of mold and the mirror is laying exactly where he dropped it, none the worse for wear.

There’s something off about this place.  It’s the same but different, more of a place forgot than before.  It’s… gloomier for lack of a better word.  As though light can’t reach it as well as it could moments ago.

“Scott!”  He can hear the high pitch to his own voice, the one that says he doesn’t expect to get an answer.  “Cora!  Lydia!  Derek!  Someone!”  There’s no rushing sound of footfalls, just the thundering rush of his own hysteria and he can’t stay here.  He can’t.

The warehouse door is still there, and so is the gravel road leading up to it but the Camaro isn’t.  The road is crunchier under his feet, the trees have more of a twisted curl to them and it’s a—a Tim Burton version of reality.  It isn’t real.  It can’t be.  It’s a dream, a nightmare.

Stuff like this doesn’t just  _happen_ , except for in really shitty horror movies.  “Supposed to stay where you are when you get lost,” he mutters to himself, blindly walking back in the open door.  It’s his mother’s advice, over and over, drilled into his head as a kid who wandered off every chance he got.

He’s not all that surprised when his feet lead him back to the mirror.   _It_  is what did this, he’s sure of it.

He peers down into the glass and sees himself reflected in it, but around him is the warehouse as he first remembers it – with light and hope and—“He’s gone.”

Stiles can’t see him but he knows that voice.  Knows that growl is Derek.  He tips the mirror but the image doesn’t change.   _He_  can’t move it, not really.

“We’ll fan out,” Erica says, sounding rather bored with the search already.  “We’ll find him.  Permission to punch him for toddling off when we do?”

Derek’s breathing is strained and it makes him more militant about keeping his voice  _steady_.  “I didn’t say he was  _missing_ ,” he snaps, angry at the wrong person.  “He’s  _gone_.  His scent trail disappears and his heartbeat—I would hear it if he were anywhere nearby.  It was a split-second, here and gone.”

“Look at this, it’s a—”  Isaac’s face appears above the mirror, brow furrowed and just starting to show worry lines around his mouth.

“ _Don’t_  touch it,” Derek snarls out, pushing him aside so his face is the one hovering over it.

Stiles’ brain finally kicks into gear.  This is his chance, to speak, to tell them, to—he croaks out, “Derek.”  His voice breaks embarrassingly and he clears his throat.  “I get it, my fault, touched the thing I shouldn’t have touched but,” he huffs, rubs a hand through his hair, “to be fair, the universe was totally pushing it at me like a whole King Arthur with Excalibur thing.  So, ‘I told you so’s are not necessary here, though help kind of is.”

“His scent’s on it,” Derek says gruffly, looking up at someone Stiles can’t see, oblivious.  He mutters under his breath, skin around his eyes tight, “Never could keep his fucking hands to himself.  Should’ve taped oven mitts on him.”

And though Stiles knows— _knows_  Derek wouldn’t ignore him, he doesn’t want to admit the reality here just yet.  Breathes out shakily, “Oy, Sourwolf,  _some_  acknowledgment would be nice.”

“What does that mean?  What did it do to him?  He’s—I mean, he’ll—”  That’s Scott.  Scott on the verge of  _true_  panic and Derek wouldn’t let that go on, not if he’d heard Stiles, not if—And Stiles can’t even keep up the illusion any longer, feels his own breaths start rattling in.

“Deaton will know what to do,” he whispers to himself, soft and desperate, clenching and unclenching his fingers into fists.  There’s no certainty to it.  He  _doesn’t_  sound sure, he just sounds scared.

“I don’t know,” Derek admits, “but we’re going to find out.”  There’s certainty _there_.  In fact, Stiles isn’t sure he’s  _ever_  heard Derek sound so sure of anything and, for the first time, he gets it.  Why he’s the Alpha, why Erica and Boyd and Isaac follow him.  There’s something  _worth_  getting behind there.

Who knew?

The image of his nostrils flaring, his head tipped down, the strong set of his jaw goes dark.  One of them must have thrown something over the mirror so they could carry it with them.  Maybe Isaac’s stupid cardigan or the silk scarf Lydia was wearing tonight or Derek’s leather jacket.

Stiles supposes it doesn’t matter.  Not for him.  He’s the one who provided the ‘quality assurance,’ taste tested a questionable meal, he’s the guinea pig.  It never works out well for them, does it?  He sinks down to the floor, brings his knees up to his chest, wraps his arms around them and tries not to give in to the feeling of dread that wants to devour him from the inside out.

* * *

He hears the conversation at Deaton’s even if he doesn’t see it.  Whatever they’ve used to cover the mirror blunts the sound some too.  But he gets the gist.

And it isn’t good.

Deaton says, ‘unsure, unfamiliar, unlikely,’ a bit too often for Stiles’ tastes.  He’s ‘unsure’ how one would go about removing a living person from a mirror.  He’s ‘unfamiliar’ with this type of black magic.  It’s ‘unlikely’ that he’ll have an answer for them soon.  He won’t even commit to the idea that Stiles is, for certain,  _in_  the mirror.

Stiles bangs on the glass with the heel of his palm and snarls, “Get fucking sure.”  He won’t get a response, but it makes him feel a bit better anyway.  He looks around at this shadowy world he’s trapped in and stops expecting someone to rescue him from it.

He’ll just have to rescue himself.

* * *

Before that though, he feels sorry for himself.  He thinks he’s entitled.

He wants to go home and then he actually thinks to.  It probably still exists here, things seems to, just not in the same way.  He crunches across the gravel, passes an empty ice cream parlor that’s not actually on that street but a few blocks over, the library that’s closer to school rather than the car wash.

The layout’s not the same but the world still exists, even if it’s just in a different configuration.  Time doesn’t seem to work the same way either, speeds up, slows down, seems to take great pleasure in its own inconsistency.  There’s one long line of houses and stores and attractions that are squashed together like ill-fitting brownstones.  There’s a malt shoppe he and his dad visited once when they were in Minnesota next to the San Diego zoo.  All the cages are empty and only tumbleweeds wouldn’t look out of place on the sidewalks.

He’s the only thing alive here and he  _knows_  it.

His house is tilted at an impossible degree, architecture that couldn’t actually exist, and he finds himself leaning over as he trudges up the stairs to his room.  He flops back onto his bed, staring up at the slanted ceiling while a broken spring digs uncomfortably into his back.  His mattress is lumpy, stripped of sheets and off-color.  He doesn’t think it’s been used in decades.

He closes his eyes, breathes deeply and hears a sharp inhale from the next room.  His eyes rip back open because there’s another gut feeling that led him astray.  He would’ve sworn he was the very definition of isolated here. 

He slides the bat out from under his bed, pleased to find it’s still there even if it’s trailing spiderwebs.  He whiffs it twice, puffs up his breaths and creeps out into the hallway.  The breathing is muffled but definitely present and coming from his dad’s bedroom.

He tightens up his grip on the handle of the bat because, here, like this, that  _isn’t_  his dad.  It can’t be.  He swings into the bedroom, finds it empty.  It’s coming from the bathroom.

He scans it from the edge of the bedroom but the shower curtain’s pulled back and the narrow room has no one in it.  Which is when he thinks to look up at the mirror.  He’s drawn to it, palm resting against the cool plane of glass, contouring to the gauntness of his dad’s cheek.

He can’t help the way he looks behind him, even though he knows he won’t see its reflection there.  Sure enough, there’s nothing but cracked ceramic.  He glances back to the mirror, to his father, sitting heavy on the lip of his bathtub, cradling a half-drunk bottle of scotch in his hands like it holds all the answers.

His eyes are wet and he swipes under his nose with his wrist.  He’s not crying.  This is so much worse than that.  He’s dragging in shaky breaths through the slight part of his lips.  Breaths that want to be sobs, that would be bawling awful things if he let them loose and instead he clenches the bottle so tightly that his knuckles turn white.

“Don’t,” Stiles gasps, puff of breath fogging the glass as his dad heedlessly takes a long swig from the mouth of it. 

He drops it back between his knees and it’s clear it’s not staying there long.

He’s not going to stop.

And Stiles doesn’t just mean with this bottle.

He stays there for as long as his father does, the both of them quietly torturing each other.

* * *

His hallway doesn’t end.  Stiles can walk from his bedroom, to his father’s, to Scott’s – two mirrors down.  It looks finite, but if he keeps walking, he never gets closer to the wall that’s across from his bedroom.  Lydia’s mirror is eighteen down from Scott’s on the opposite side, Isaac’s is only four.  Cora’s is across from it.

It’s less of a funhouse and more of a lesson in self-restraint.  He wants to be near them, but without invading their privacy or intruding on their pain.  It’s not possible and he figures that out rather quickly.  He sits in the center of the hallway that never ends, covers his ears with his elbows and screams into the emptiness.

He can’t break the mirrors, can’t write messages on them, can’t shake them, can’t affect them in any way he’s tried so far.  He’s ineffective, world-weary and unkillable.  Thirst, hunger, anything remotely human doesn’t exist here.  He just goes on and on like the hallway.  His fingernails don’t grow, his stomach doesn’t growl, he doesn’t get tired, nothing happens to him.

Over and over again, nothing happens to him.

He finds Derek’s mirror by accident and it ends up being the one he stays closest to.  He can’t really say why, only knows that he feels the least like an intruder there.  Derek’s efficient, unmoved, stoic.  He’s not going to have a breakdown in his bathroom, he’s going to brush his teeth and shower and piss and keep moving.  When he does speak, it’s in short barks.  He says clipped, definitive things and Stiles likes the certainty of it, detachedness of it.

He slumps down in Derek’s bathtub in the other world and listens to the sound of running water, of a muffled life being lived.  He can’t see into it then but he doesn’t need to, this is enough.

His eyes are closed and his ears are perked intently for the sound of Derek’s sink dripping when a voice breaks into the ambient noise.  It’s Cora’s and it’s gruff, the way she is.  The way all Hales seem to be.  “We’ll find him,” she says, and she’s mimicking Derek’s certainty but without the same conviction.

Stiles sits up.  They don’t talk about him much.  And maybe they’re not?  Maybe something  _else_ —something  _more_ —has happened to them.  He wouldn’t even be that surprised to find out that’s the case.  Regardless, he gets the feeling it’s been a good chunk of time since he’s gone missing.  He tries not to think about it.  It had seemed like they were working off the same playbook and Cora’s officially gone off it.  He steps up to the mirror, looks into it for the first time in a while.

Derek’s towels are different. 

“He’s dead,” Derek snarls back and he’s glaring into the mirror, as though challenging Stiles to disprove it.  If only he could.

There’s real hate in his voice and it’s not stoic anymore.  It’s hopeless.

“You don’t know that,” she retorts but it’s lacking any heat, like she can’t even make herself believe it.  She watches him in the mirror for a long while but he never looks back at her, holds himself stiff like he can’t bear to, and she retreats when she finally seems to realize she’s not going to get any more than this.

There’s such an intense silence that settles after she’s gone that even Stiles can hear the front door slam behind her. 

Derek immediately unwinds, hanging looser, more limply, above the sink.  He stares down into it, palms gripping either side and breathes like a bull about to escape from its pen.  His eyes slide back up to the mirror and he sneers but he can’t hold onto it, his upper lip keeps shaking and he pulls back, nostrils flaring and he gasps out with less control, “He’s dead.  He’s  _dead_.”  His voice shakes and he blinks owlish eyes at his own reflection—at Stiles’ shocked face and half-laughs, says wildly, “That’s what happens to the people I love.”

Stiles stumbles back hard, hits the edge of the tub and topples down into it painfully.  Derek had looked broken, back hunched over and shoulders pulled in and  _broken_.  Over Stiles.  Whom he’d never even  _liked_.

He didn’t.  He  _couldn’t_.  He was—he wasn’t—That wasn’t reality, whatever that was.  It was just another lie, it had to be.

Stiles is actually  _trembling_  as he awkwardly and stiffly levers himself out of the tub on shaky limbs.  He guardedly shuffles halfway back and says hoarsely, “What did you—”  It’s a mere suggestion of words, a wisp of sound.  He can’t wrap his tongue around it because he can’t wrap his  _mind_  around it.  He squints at Derek, at where he’s bent over and breathing hard while he stares down at his shoes so Stiles can’t see his face.  And that’s not okay because Stiles has—he has  _questions_ , okay?  Like: “ _What_  did you just say—What di—”

Derek looks up like he’s trying to pull himself together, sniffs hard, eyes shiny and wet.

Stiles shakes off the awe, the surprise, the warmth and want he hadn’t even known he’d felt until he’s shedding it and gets  _mean_.  The last fucking thing Stiles heard from that mouth was a condescending, ‘You shouldn’t even be here.’

This isn’t real.  This is just nonsense.

“You are such a lying piece of shit, you know that?” he snarls out and his fist slams into the glass between them, shakes only on his side.  “You treat me like an incompetent child the entire time I’m—” he waves his hand to encompass ‘around,’ “and then you have the balls to act like you  _lost_  something?”  He bares his teeth, wishing he had something he could  _tear_  into with his hands.  “You’re just gonna use this too, huh?  Gonna add this to your back-breaking load of misery and man-pain?  ‘The boy I loved and treated like shit is dead now too so I don’t have to ever open up to anyone again,’” he mocks in an infantile voice.  “Is that right?”

He glares at the way Derek is hanging his head, eyes closed and breathing deeply as though trying to gain back his control and he gets more furious than he’s  _ever_  been before.

“You are so fucking pitiful,” he hisses.  “You didn’t love me.  You  _didn’t_.  You  _don’t_ , so shut up.”  He smashes his forefinger up against the glass as he points at him.  “Don’t you dare try to act like I meant  _anything_  to you while I was standing right next to you, like I’m responsible for you closing yourself off further.  You’re just using this so you can get away with being even less of a person and you don’t get to fucking put that on me, you prick.”

Stiles slams his fist as hard as he can into the mirror this time and his hand starts throbbing almost immediately, knuckles coming away bloody.  He doesn’t need food, doesn’t need water, don’t need sleep but he can still feel pain.  Isn’t that just fucking perfect?

Can’t bode well, really, that all he has left is that he can hurt himself.

He tosses one last disgusted look towards Derek before he leaves him to his own manufactured pain, refusing to be an audience to something so fucking staged for even a moment longer.

* * *

“Was with my dad last night.”  Stiles doesn’t know why he came back to Derek’s mirror, why he’s telling him this.  He’s doing exactly what Stiles had predicted he would.  Retreating, cutting people out, isolating himself.  And it’s so fucking  _aggravating_  when Stiles would give anything to be where he is, doing everything differently.

It’s so far from okay.

He may not have even shaved since the last time Stiles saw him.  Stiles snorts to himself, holding on to his bloody arm.  “Rocking a real darkside Rick Grimes vibe there, mountain man.”  He stares down at the red slipping out from under his tight fingers.  It was an accident, or he’s telling himself it was an accident.  Cutting himself on that spring in his mattress.  An accident, an unfortunate one.  One that might happen again.

He shakes himself out of it, looks back at the wildness in Derek’s eyes.  “He’s not…” Stiles swallows, “he’s not doing well.”  He squints at Derek, tells him, “You need to try harder.  Scott and—”  Stiles won’t go back to Scott’s mirror, can’t, not after he’s seen the light snuffed out in his eyes, the deadness to his movements, seen the _not_ -Scott-ness of him.  “You need to look after them and you’re not.  If you—If you meant what you said then I think you know it’s what I want.”

He watches Derek a little longer, doesn’t like the manic engery to him and leaves again.

He doesn’t know for how long.

* * *

Stiles leans up against the tile on the same side of Derek’s mirror so he can’t see into it.  He slumps down against the wall, ass cold, and picks at the scab on his forearm.  “So, being a dick, huh?” he asks, apropos of nothing.  Derek’s in there, brushing his teeth.  Takes him almost five minutes now with how slow and deliberate his movements are.  It’s still weird to think of him doing mundane human things like that.  Stiles still half-expects to find him picking his teeth with an animal bone one day.  “That your best effort when it comes to flirting?”

Because Stiles is maybe starting to buy into it, against his better judgment, that Derek  _cared_  – however much.  You can’t mourn someone the way Derek’s mourning him without—without—without  _something_. 

Little spots of bubbling blood appear under the skin he’s picked away on his arm.  “I get it,” he sighs, “what Lydia was saying that night.”  He stares up at the cracks in the ceiling paint.  “You don’t know  _how_  to be concerned anymore.  You don’t know how to be anything but angry now and you tried to use that to keep me safe.”

He hunches up his shoulders, pulls them into his chest.  “There were better ways to go about that, you know?  Scott told me though, a long time ago now, that your anchor was anger.  I guess I didn’t realize what that meant, that that was the emotion you knew best now.”  He digs his thumb and forefinger into his eyes and breathes deeply.  “If I ever—If I ever figure a way out of here and we’re ever… you’re going to have to try harder.  Be more than an angry guy who’s lost a lot.  If it helps,” Stiles’ head  _thunks_  back against the wall and he says seriously, “I’m pretty sure you can do it.”

* * *

A blankness behind Derek’s eyes starts to form over time and it unsettles Stiles more and more the more deep-set it gets.  He can’t bring himself to spend time there as he once did.  He doesn’t want to watch Cora get red-faced, veins popping, screaming, only to have Derek sit silently and take it, refusing to react to her presence at all.

It had made him feel nauseous just to witness it. 

But when he figures it out—when he finally thinks it through because cursed objects, they don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re  _meant_ for something—he has to go back then.  He has to tell Derek, because he has to say it out loud at least once. 

He waits outside his mirror and it takes Derek a long time to come to it.  He rubs at his hairy chin when he does, stares at himself like he doesn’t see anything looking back. Stiles tries to speak.  He ends up pulling in a huge sobbing breath instead. 

And it doesn’t stop, he’s half-laughing and half-crying and he shakes out the words, “I know what it’s doing now.”  He touches the mirror over Derek’s cheek and sniffs.  “What it  _is_.  Spending so much time alone, you start to hate yourself.”  He snorts even though it’s a sad truth.  “Which makes it a lot easier to hate everyone else.  Malevolent spirits rarely start out that way, you know?”

He chuckles bitterly to himself.  “And there’s been lore about mirrors for as long as there’s been written records of them.  This is why.  This is how you get twisted into it.  Got nothing but time to get violent about being so lonely, so alone, get mean, get cruel, get  _evil_.  This is it.  I’m becoming one of them, just another monster that in a few centuries someone will come put down.”  He’s hoping it will take  _at least_  a few centuries for him to get twisted enough to attract that kind of attention but maybe it won’t.  Maybe his humanity will cave in on itself a lot sooner than that.  “Is that irony?  A monster hunter becoming the thing it hunts?  Either way, talk about a shitty end, right?”

He can’t catch his breath.  Feels sick and doesn’t  _want_  to be evil, doesn’t want to be something that’s only purpose is to cause pain.  He was that once and he never wants to go back to it again.

He rests his forehead against the mirror, closes his eyes tight, and says, low and rough, “I think I could’ve loved you too.  That we really could’ve been something.  If I’d known, if I’d thought you could ever—” he snorts to himself and it’s a wet sound, “That doesn’t matter now though, does it?”

He pulls away and blinks hard.

“I’m not coming back here,” he says softly, touching his fingertips to Derek’s brow.  “I’m afraid that when I—when it starts, I don’t want anyone I care about to be the ones that I… so I’m going to leave you alone.  To heal, I hope.  Because you have people who’ll want you to.”  He tries to smile but it wobbles and falls and shatters and Stiles whispers, “Goodbye, Derek.”

* * *

There are cobwebs in the hollow of his neck and attaching his knee to the grainy wood floor and he hasn’t moved in  _so long_  when he hears the unmistakable sound of glass breaking.  Every muscle is sore from disuse but Stiles hobbles to his feet, stumbles down the path of  _his_  mirrors for the first time since he said his farewell to Derek’s. 

He hadn’t trusted himself to roam around after that. 

He goes back to the last he visited and can tell the difference in the room before he’s even entered it.  There are blinding cracks of white light breaking into his side of it, zigzagging beams cutting across porcelain and tile.  He holds a forearm up over his eyes, trying to let them adjust.  

Derek’s behind it and breathing so loudly that it seems as though Stiles should be able to feel it against his cheek.  He’s rumpled, skin loose, and he looks like a shell of his former self.  His torso’s bare and thin and his pajama bottoms are loose like he’s been losing weight for some time now.  His expression is torn somewhere between despair and rage and he pulls back with a fist that’s still actively healing cuts, nostrils flaring, and slams it into the mirror again. 

Whole pieces of it fall away, shatter anew when they hit the floor on Stiles’ side, and the light is  _blinding_ , making the entire ball of Stiles’ eyes throb.  He squints against it, shuffles his foot across the floor without picking it up and reaches his fingertips into a beam of light.

He wiggles them, thinks he hears a gasp on the other side and decides.  He throws his shoulder into the cracked mirror and the whole thing breaks around him, like he’s slammed into a cresting wave.  It resists him, tries to throw him back, but ultimately he pushes through and once it’s clear which way it’s going – the mirror  _explodes_  into razor-fine pieces of glass.

Then he’s falling—falling through the mirror, falling from one world into another, falling into Derek and dragging them both down.  He hears Derek make a punched sound beneath him and they both hit the ground with impact.  Then Derek’s pulling his head up, blinking down at where Stiles is crumpled against his chest and he can’t seem to catch his breath.  Licks his lips and stares in awe and disbelief.  His eyes are shining and he gasps, huffs, can’t get his lungs around it still. 

Finally, hopefully, he croaks out one word: “Stiles?”

Stiles swallows against a dry throat and he doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to start.  Can’t say—can’t say I saw you, can’t say he knows, can’t say he’s in the same place because—because he’s doing this right, now that they have the time.  Now that they’re in the same place.

“Hey,” he says back and it scrapes up, sounding like he had to drag it through dirt and glass and gravel to get it there but it’s only the words that matter.  He feels Derek breathe for the first time since he spoke, like he was holding it in until this moment, and it raises his chest with it and Stiles feels more settled.  Derek’s warm skin against his cold and he says, “You wanna maybe go out sometime for curly fries?  Like,  _date-type_  curly fries?”

Because curly fries sound amazing right now.  Almost as amazing as eating them with Derek does.

Derek stares down at him, skepticism in the lift of his brow and disapproval in the set of his mouth.  Because that’s what he does.  That’s how he treats Stiles, like a misbehaving child, and maybe nothing’s really changed for him.  Maybe he’s still just an angry guy who’s lost a lot.

He opens his mouth, visibly swallows down his first response and—despite looking like he doesn’t believe this is real yet—he only has one answer either way: “Okay.”

* * *

Halfway across town, Deaton walks back into his office to find a shattered mirror in the world’s ugliest frame lying innocuously on his desk.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a [tumblr](http://wellhalesbells.tumblr.com/), it's a glorious mess.


End file.
